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HPCSA vs Professor Noakes -The story sofar
p>As you receive this note I will be in the air, just about to land in Cape Town, having been asked by Professor Tim Noakes to be an expert witnesses at his hearing. As promised in last week’s note, this week I will share what I am able to about the case, the charges and what has been going on at the hearings so far. I am only going to report on the prosecution case in this note (fear not – there’s more than enough to cover on this alone. In fact, today’s note is twice the normal length, but, trust me, it’s terrific stuff!) The notes that follow come from the hearing evidence, which has been given so far. I will use quotation marks and italics, so that you can clearly see where I am quoting verbatim.

Abbreviations

ADSA: Association for Dietetics in South Africa.

CJS: Claire Julsing Strydom – the “complainant”.

HPCSA: Heath Professionals Council of South Africa – the “pro-forma complainant”.

ProfTN: Professor Tim Noakes – the “respondent”.

TLT: Tim’s Legal Team (rather than naming the particular lawyer for each comment).

Vorster: Professor Vorster – an academic and witness for the prosecution – more details given under “Hearing two – witnesses called.

The chain of events

The original tweet

All this started with a tweet. For those of you who tweet, I imagine most tweets you spend seconds thinking about, hit “tweet” and then get on with your day. @ProfTimNoakes has over 77,000 followers and he has tweeted over 31,000 times, since joining Twitter in April 2012. Who would have thought that one single tweet would have led to all this?

The newsletter on Monday 10th October addressed the South African Dietary Guidelines, as a warm-up to the upcoming fourth hearing in the case of the Health Professionals Council of SA (HPCSA) against Professor Tim Noakes. In preparation for my appearance as an expert witness, I have been through approximately 1,400 pages of transcripts from the hearings so far. The notes to date all relate to the case for the prosecution and the witnesses that they have called. For those of you who want the headlines, the newsletter on Monday 17th October will summarise these. For those of you who want as much detail as possible - here it is...
Abbreviations

ADSA: Association for Dietetics in South Africa.
CJS: Claire Julsing Strydom – the “complainant”.
HPCSA: Health Professionals Council of South Africa.
ProfTN: Professor Tim Noakes – the “respondent”.
TLT: Tim’s Legal Team (rather than naming the particular lawyer for each comment).

I will use quotation marks and italics, so that you can clearly see where I am quoting verbatim. Where I make a comment, I will use (ZH – and then the comment). I will be sticking to the narrative as much as possible.
It started with a tweet

This case started with a tweet. For those of you who tweet, I imagine most tweets you spend seconds thinking about, hit “tweet” and then get on with your day. @ProfTimNoakes has over 77,000 followers and he has tweeted over 31,000 times, since joining Twitter in April 2012. Who would have thought that one single tweet would have led to all this?
...

Next Monday’s note will summarise the background to the case, the charges and what has been going on at the hearings so far. I’ll remind you now of the origin of this entire case, as it is particularly pertinent to the dietary guidelines that this note reviews.

These were the headlines that we woke up to on Thursday 29th September 2016. More specifically, it was claimed that a Mediterranean diet could prevent 20,000 deaths in Britaineach year. That’s an important clarification, as we’re all going to die.

There were three really interesting learnings from this study: i) we get a detailed definition of what researchers think the Mediterranean Diet is (as opposed to what Mediterranean people actually eat); ii) we get a new (and incomprehensible) way of guessing (estimating) the impact of this made up diet on deaths; and iii) we get an example of the new way of reporting studies/grabbing headlines, which I forecast will end the “20% greater risk “ coverage we have suffered to date.